HMS Ark Royal (91): The Carrier That Crippled the Bismarck and Sank to a Single Torpedo

A Carrier Ahead of Her Time

HMS Ark Royal was built by Cammell Laird at Birkenhead, her keel laid on 16 September 1935 and launched on 13 April 1937 by Lady Maud Hoare, wife of the First Lord of the Admiralty, in a christening ceremony that reportedly took four attempts to break the champagne bottle, a faintly ominous start for a ship whose fate would later prompt its own official inquiries.

She commissioned on 16 December 1938 as an innovative design, the first carrier on which the hangars and flight deck were built as an integral part of the hull rather than added on top, displacing 23,000 tons, capable of over 31 knots on trials, and designed to operate up to 72 aircraft, though 50 to 60 was the more usual practical figure.

Sunk by Propaganda, Twice

Ark Royal's early war career quickly made her a target of German propaganda as much as German weapons. On 14 September 1939 she responded to a distress call from the merchant ship SS Fanad Head, and her escorting destroyers sank U-39, the first U-boat lost in the entire war.

Less than a fortnight later, on 26 September, she shot down a German Dornier flying boat, and the Germans, apparently working from wishful thinking rather than evidence, falsely claimed to have sunk her, a claim so persistent that Winston Churchill had to personally reassure President Roosevelt that she remained afloat.

The first of those claims came from a single bomb. On 26 September 1939 a Luftwaffe pilot, Lieutenant Adolf Francke, put one into the sea roughly fifteen feet off her bow. The damage amounted to some broken crockery. Francke was decorated twice for sinking her, and German radio announced it as fact, which is how a ship that had lost nothing but a few plates became the most persistently sunk vessel of the war. Lord Haw-Haw took to asking the question in his broadcasts, again and again: where is the Ark Royal? The broadcasts were piped through the ship's tannoy, and the answer the ship's company shouted back at the loudspeakers was, by every account, some variation of we are here.

It kept happening. The Italians announced they had bombed her off the Balearics in July 1941, when she had only just arrived in the Mediterranean and was entirely undamaged. The joke ran for two years, and it is genuinely difficult now to convey how much it mattered. In 1939 and 1940 Britain had very few carriers, no obvious way of winning, and a great deal riding on what neutral countries believed. A rumour that the most famous ship in the fleet had gone down was worth attacking. Churchill assuring Roosevelt personally that she was afloat sounds like an odd use of a prime minister's time until you remember what he was trying to buy.

That autumn she deployed to Freetown as part of Force K hunting the German pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee, and her aircraft spotted the German supply tanker Altmark on 9 October and helped capture the merchant ship Uhenfels that November, contributions to the wider deception and pursuit operation that eventually forced Graf Spee to scuttle herself near Montevideo in December 1939.

Norway, Mers-el-Kébir, and the Mediterranean

During the Norway campaign in the spring of 1940, Ark Royal provided the Royal Navy's first significant experience of carrier-based fighter protection for warships, covering the evacuations at Molde and Åndalsnes, though an attack on the German battlecruiser Scharnhorst on 13 June cost her dearly, with eight of the fifteen Skua aircraft involved shot down.

She joined Force H at Gibraltar that June and took part in the deeply controversial attack on the French fleet at Mers-el-Kébir, and in November 1940 fought at the Battle of Cape Spartivento against the Italian fleet, damaging the destroyer Lanciere.

She flew bombing raids against Italian targets including Genoa and La Spezia in January 1941, and in May that year helped defend a convoy to Alexandria, where just twelve of her Fulmar fighters managed to repel more than fifty attacking aircraft.

The Ship That Crippled the Bismarck

Ark Royal's single most famous moment came in the last week of May 1941, during the hunt for the German battleship Bismarck. Her Swordfish biplanes located Bismarck on 26 May, and a first strike of fifteen aircraft went disastrously wrong, mistakenly attacking the British cruiser HMS Sheffield after their torpedoes' magnetic detonators proved unreliable, fortunately without scoring a hit.

The Sheffield episode is far more instructive than the word mistake suggests, because it is the reason the second strike worked. The signal telling the fleet that Sheffield had been detached to shadow Bismarck never reached the aircrews before they launched. Flying in appalling weather, they broke cloud, saw a large warship where no British ship was supposed to be, and attacked it. Eleven torpedoes went into the water. A good number of them exploded the moment they hit the sea, because they were fitted with Duplex magnetic pistols. Sheffield's captain ordered his guns not to fire under any circumstances, signalled that the enemy was fifteen miles to the north, rang on full speed and combed the rest.

So when the Swordfish came back aboard and were rearmed, somebody made the decision that decided the whole hunt: put the older, simpler contact pistols on instead. A magnetic pistol is supposed to fire under a ship's keel, where there is no armour, and it was the cleverer weapon. It also did not work. The contact pistol only goes off when it hits something solid, which is exactly what happened a few hours later against Bismarck's stern. An accidental attack on a British cruiser produced the technical lesson that jammed a German battleship's rudder. There is no version of that story that anyone would have dared to plan.

A second, re-armed strike found its mark properly: three torpedoes struck Bismarck, two forward of her engine rooms and, decisively, one against her starboard steering compartment, jamming her rudder in a 15-degree turn to port.

Unable to manoeuvre, Bismarck was run down by British battleships and sunk the following day, a result owed almost entirely to a handful of obsolete-looking biplanes launched from Ark Royal's deck, arguably the single most consequential strike flown by any British carrier during the entire war.

And the aircraft that did it deserve a word. A Fairey Swordfish was a fabric-covered biplane with an open cockpit, a top speed of about 138 miles an hour and a crew of three sitting in the weather. It was obsolete when the war began. On the evening of 26 May 1941 fifteen of them took off from a pitching deck in a full gale, in the dark, found a battleship in the Atlantic, and attacked her through the heaviest anti-aircraft fire in the German navy. Not one was shot down, and the usual explanation is that Bismarck's fire control could not compute a solution for anything flying that slowly. The Swordfish was too out of date to be hit properly.

That summer she turned to the desperate business of supplying besieged Malta, delivering aircraft and escorting supply convoys through Operations Substance and Halberd between June and September 1941, unglamorous but critical work keeping the island in the war.

One Torpedo, and a Fatal Design Flaw

Ark Royal's own end came on 13 November 1941, when the German submarine U-81, commanded by Friedrich Guggenberger, torpedoed her amidships at 15:40, striking between her fuel bunkers and bomb store directly below the bridge and punching a hole roughly 130 feet by 30 feet in her hull below the waterline.

Remarkably, the explosion itself killed only one man, Able Seaman Edward Mitchell, but the damage set in motion a chain of failures that would prove fatal to the ship herself.

Flooding quickly knocked out her starboard boiler room, internal communications and starboard power, and she developed an 18-degree list within twenty minutes.

Captain Loben Maund ordered a general evacuation to the flight deck, a decision that, however understandable given the circumstances, meant damage control efforts were delayed by 49 minutes while flooding spread unchecked. Critically, Ark Royal had no backup diesel generators, so once her boilers and steam-driven dynamos failed, the pumps needed to fight the flooding lost power too.

Her list reached 27 degrees by 4am the following morning, and all 1,487 officers and crew were evacuated safely to the destroyer HMS Legion, with only Mitchell lost in the entire sinking, a notably remarkable survival rate for the loss of a fleet carrier. Ark Royal finally capsized and sank at 6:19am on 14 November 1941.

The Verdict, and the Wreck

Captain Maund was court-martialled in February 1942 and found guilty of two counts of negligence, failing to maintain damage control parties after the evacuation and failing to keep the ship ready for damage management, though the board acknowledged that an unusually high standard had been expected of him and that his primary concern throughout had been the welfare of his crew.

A separate inquiry, the Bucknill Committee, concluded that fundamental design flaws, not command failure, were the true cause of the loss, particularly the vulnerable, uninterrupted boiler room arrangement, and its recommendations were subsequently incorporated into the design of the Illustrious and Implacable-class carriers that followed.

The design failure the Bucknill Committee identified is worth spelling out. Her boiler rooms ran uninterrupted across the ship, so flooding on one side could not be contained on that side, and the venting and cable runs above them offered a path for water and for the loss of power together. She had no independent diesel generators: once the boilers were out and the steam-driven dynamos stopped, so did the pumps, the lighting and most of the means of fighting the flooding. That combination is what turned a survivable hit into a lost ship, and the recommendations that came out of it went straight into the carriers built afterwards. Ark Royal's last contribution to the war was to show the constructors exactly what not to do.

The wreck itself was not found until December 2002, discovered by C & C Technologies using a sonar-equipped autonomous vehicle roughly 30 nautical miles east of Gibraltar at a depth of 3,300 feet, some 13 miles from where she was officially recorded as sinking.

Lying in two main sections, the wreck's condition supported the Bucknill Committee's original findings: attempts to restart her engines for power had actually increased the stresses on an already compromised hull, worsening the flooding rather than saving the ship.

It was, in the end, a design failure that sank Ark Royal, not a single lucky torpedo, and certainly not the crew who had, just months earlier, helped bring down one of the most powerful battleships in the world.